pieces, now

I got an email today from the riad where J. and I stayed in Marrakech 15 months ago, offering extra nights to health care workers. 

Remember when we could travel?

...

After weeks of avoiding it, we started taking the pup to doggie daycare again. People joke about how dogs are loving having their people home, but our dog has just ramped up her protective instincts and now she is anxious all the time. She has an archnemesis, Big Floof, and she barks like her life depends on driving the enemy away when Big Floof walks by. Other floofs get varying treatment (some pass unnoticed, some also get barks), but the passing by of Big Floof is a matter not to be tolerated. Unfortunately, Big Floof's people walk Big Floof by our house about 6 times a day. 

We have to take her to doggie daycare just to give her a break from all the anxiety. 

I have now picked her up from doggie daycare one time (in the World Before, J. did drop off and pick up on his way to and from work). I also had to drop off our ballots on the way home, so I pulled through a branch of the library and then drove home on a route that I don't take all that often, but that has, it turns out, quite a few restaurants in which I have spent time. 

There is the wings place that makes our favorite hot sauce. 

There is the restaurant where I met my friend A. when she came back to town, and where V. and I met after work for a drink on the patio the time that I rode my bike there after Pilates. 

There is the restaurant where J. and I went for brunch on our last pre-pandemic baby-free date. It's hard to imagine now that we waited in a crowded line, chatting with the couple in front of us, and sat at tables barely 18 inches apart. 

There is the coffee shop where I got coffee and a stroopwafel and sat with them in the sun on the day I picked up our wedding invitations.

I felt overwhelmingly sad. 

That life will come back - the epidemiologists I follow on Twitter seem fairly confident that science will find a vaccine or a treatment that works - but those exact places may not. The coffee shop by my work is already gone, the one that made a delightful levain bread and an amazing mocha (I had to limit myself to one every week or two, because they were so rich). 

It's such a small thing, but it feels like the beginning of many changes.

...

We have a collection of fabric masks. My mom sent some, and I ordered some that ended up fitting me well and J. not so well, so we ordered some more in a different size and shape. 

I never imagined having a collection of masks, not even when I saw people wearing them in Southeast Asia. It just was never a part of my life. 

Now I have a mask with strawberries on it, and one with crabs, and another with robots. J. has one with flamingos and one with a Cuban cityscape. I even got a tiny one for W. with dinosaurs on it. He's too young to wear a mask regularly, but I got one just in case at some point he has a cough and we have to go into a building, say for medical care, to keep him from coughing on people until we get in there. 

...

Daycare reopens soon. What would you do?

We are sending W., I think, so that we can get some work done while the case counts are low here, and to support his daycare. I keep reading of how daycares are going to have to close, since their margins are already so low, and now people aren't sending their kids back.

But then I read about the health problems that Covid can cause in children, and I reconsider.

There is no right decision. 

what is missing

Covid pandemic shelter in place week 135039385, or whatever this is. I think we are in week 6 here in this house. 

Things I miss, in no particular order except that the biggest one is at the end:

1. Sunny Saturday afternoons on restaurant patios. One afternoon in February, we met a friend for pizza. We sat outside in the sunshine next to the sidewalk. That was nice. For that matter, I miss eating in restaurants in general. Even just for lunch during the work week. 
2. Stopping for coffee or a snack on a walk. Now I have to have everything with me that I might need: drinks, snacks, pup treats, diapers. No more almond croissants and hazelnut lattes on the way past the coffee shop. (The first (?) week we were doing this, when the coffee shop was still open, we stopped outside. J. went in and got a $100 gift card. "Thanks, man!" the barista said. "Do you want a free coffee or something?" But J. didn't want to touch anything. He just took the gift card, put it away, and sanitized his hands. It was a gesture, a hope. Someday, we hope, we'll be back. They will be back.)
3. Not worrying about what is on the things others have touched. I never ever before worried about the outside of a pizza box, or the plastic bag someone gave me to clean up the dog's poop when mine ran out, or the ball that our friends' 2 year old kicked into the street. This makes it much harder to give and receive those little kindnesses. 
4. Adult humans other than J. I feel very, very lucky to like my quarantine people so much, and I'm calling friends far more often, but I miss being less than 10 feet away from other adult humans.
5. Going to work. There's a reason I don't work from home full time. I like working in an office with other people.
6. Leaving the baby with someone else sometimes. Sometimes you need a break. Sometimes you need to talk to adults. Sometimes you need to get some solid work done without an exploring baby around. I miss being able to do those things. 
7. Not worrying about how close people are. I want to be able to walk right past someone working in their front yard and tell them how nice it looks, not swerve away from them into the  street like they have cooties.
8. Feeling reasonably, healthily secure when I think about the future. Just everything: jobs, houses, people, trips. 
9. Going places. The coast. The mountains. The Mitten. The dry state south of here where J.'s parents live. We have tickets to the Netherlands for the summer. What are the chances we'll make it there this summer? Low, I think. 
10. Not worrying so very much about the people I love. 

so many parentheses

It's been gloriously sunny here lately. The tulips and daffodils are up (even fading by now, some of them). The trees are blossoming everywhere you look, with riotous heavy bunches of pink petals hanging off the branches. They are all in bloom: dogwoods, magnolias, camellias, azaleas, rhododendrons, even the wisteria and lilacs are starting to show white and lavender and purple. 

It's been gloriously sunny here lately. Almost every day I take a walk in the afternoon, W. in the stroller, to soak in some sunshine and get away from my desk for a few minutes. I chat with someone on the phone, or J. and the pup come along, or sometimes I just walk to the sounds of nature - more nature than you usually get in the city. Without the sound or smell of cars, the air feels clear and clean. 

It's been gloriously sunny here lately. 

Isn't that strange?

It's not strange. It's spring. Every spring, some days are classic Gone West changeable spring days: raining one moment, sunny the next, rainbows like I've never seen anywhere else. Some days are classic Gone West bright sunny spring days, the kind that give you hope for summer. Some days are classic Gone West rainy gloomy days, the kind that remind you of winter.

But somehow it feels like the weather should mirror the tension in the world, the fear and grief that is going on in overloaded hospitals and overwhelmed cities. 

...

If it were not for the worry, if it were not for the work I'm still trying to get done with a wiggly baby around, this would be a lovely time. W. is in such a cute phase, and I'm happy to get to spend more time with him. He crawls and climbs and explores. He's learning to go down the stairs (although he will only do this for J. For me, he cries and holds out his arms). He loves bottles and cups of any sort (watch your coffee or beer). He can reach way higher than a not-even-1-year-old should be able to reach (don't leave things on the edge of the table). He pulls the leaves off my monstera and jasmine plants (I moved them to the front step. The sun burned them. Now they are on the back step). He tries desperately to get to my keyboard when I'm working. 

He is a lot of work, don't get me wrong, but in some ways this time is what I envisioned my parental leave would be: walks while he naps in the stroller, dinner out on the patio as the day cools, sitting in the porch swing with him while the world goes by (such as the world is right now, but we live on a bike route, so there are bikes and pedestrians most of the time). 

(Clearly I pictured newborns as much more tractable than they turn out to be. I imagined that he would cheerfully nap wherever we were. Not so. He was cranky wherever we went, and I felt sick with exhaustion all the time. Last summer is a blur.)

...

We talked about the five stages of grief early on in this. I still see a lot of denial and anger out in the world, and I'll probably cycle back to that, but for now I'm in acceptance. We know that diseases can jump from animals to humans. We know that we are vulnerable bodies in the world. For me, it's very helpful to think, "Why not now?"

[Baby contribution -> ';;./.-LA]

Why now? Well, why not now? 

For so many centuries, people died of infectious diseases. They still do, in so many parts of the world. The siblings of my Oma died as babies of things that antibiotics would have cured. We've been mostly liberated from that misery and grief here in the US, thanks to vaccines and medication. Now we are learning that our control is not complete. It's hard to give up control. 

When I lived in Rwanda, one of the staff who worked for my organization once came and said that he didn't feel well. I offered him some ibuprofen, and he stared at it and asked me what to do with it. I explained that he should to take two tablets three times a day - morning, midday, and before bed. It had never before occurred to me that I just medicate myself, most of the time, when I don't feel well. (Did you read that article about how average temperatures are going down, thanks to pain relievers? We just spend less time sick than people did for millennia.) 

So I'm here, hunkering down with my loves, trying to spare the world more contagion. 

happenings

Things that happened:

1. The dog got puppy mouth warts and we couldn't take her to play with other dogs for a month. She lives to play with other dogs - there is nothing she loves more, except maybe sleeping on a human bed with a human - and has more energy than can be dealt with at home, so things were difficult. We ended up doing things like wandering around parks in the dark after everyone else was gone, throwing a light-up ball. (Too bad she doesn't like balls that much.) We also tried standing at opposite ends of the house, calling her back and forth in exchange for handfuls of her meal. It kind of worked, but it was exhausting.
2. A pebble caught my windshield as I got on the highway, and by the time I got to work, there was a 12-16 inch crack across the driver's side. I need to get it replaced, but no time, people. No time.
3. A tree fell on J.'s car while he and the pup were hiking with a friend. The car turns out to be totaled, so he doesn't have a car right now. This means that we have to decide whether to get a new Subie or have him drive what was previously my car to work and buy something small and fuel-efficient to drive only in town (see #7, below). I'm not-very-secretly angling for a little scooter in addition to whatever else we get, and J. does not seem as anti-scooter as he was before. 
4. The water line to the ice maker on the fridge sprang a leak and leaked down between the wall and the wood floor, causing water damage that required tearing out flooring and drywall and all the lower cabinets and counters, and the insulation down in the crawl space, and then a weekend of fans and dehumidifiers that sounded like an airplane was landing in the kitchen. The pup despised it, to the point where we had to carry her past it, cringing, and she would run away when we tried to lure her back inside the house. The mitigation is done, but the repairs have not yet begun, so currently there is a table set up next to the sink on the plywood floor that currently constitutes the kitchen. Also, the fridge is in the dining room and the cabinets are outside. 
5. J. and I made a bid on a house that needed a lot of work, like $100K of work, and then the seller tried to get us into a bidding war, and we backed out.
6. I'm on my last week at my current job (today was my second to last commute) and of course it decided to snow. It snows once or twice a year, and this turned out to be the week. Fortunately, it didn't get down to 32 degrees on my commute home until I was just about to my exit. The side streets are slippery, but the highway was fine. I made it home in only 56 minutes, which may be a record, because everyone else stayed home or ditched work early.
7. A week from now, my commute home will be 2 miles instead of 52. That makes up for a lot. I can walk, even, or take the bus. That, my friends, is good news. I feel like I finally get to have Gone West back. I've missed it, these years of spending my days in State City. 

This life is a bit of a comedy of problems right now, but you can either laugh or cry. We are doing a lot of laughing in these parts. 

pre-Thanksgivinging

I like Thanksgiving a lot. It might be my favorite holiday. No presents to buy, no decorating to do, just lots of delicious food. This year, though, J. and I are getting on a plane on Thanksgiving morning to go scuba diving in the Philippines. 

I've known that we would miss Thanksgiving for many months, ever since January when I got all excited about scuba diving and started looking at the best dive spots in the world and then checking kayak for flights costs to those spots. Fiji was $1000, which seemed pretty good. But Manila was $630 if we left on Thanksgiving Day, so we bought flights without stopping to think about it. 

I'm excited about this trip. I have a whole new regulator/dive computer/octopus set, thanks to J. thinking ahead on my birthday and a quick trip to my favorite dive shop. (My own! My very own regulator and dive computer!) We have eight dives scheduled, including my first two night dives. (I also bought a dive light at the dive shop.) The island looks stunning. 

I also started feeling a little sad about not getting to have Thanksgiving dinner. Wherefore the pies?

So I managed to talk J. into having a pie and game night last night. He also wanted mashed potatoes, so we made those. And corn pudding and burgers and brats. Because what says Thanksgiving like burgers and brats? 

We invited people over, and we did the cooking and baking, and we ate the delicious things. And now we have leftovers until we get on the plane. I just had a veggie burger with a side of mashed potatoes and corn pudding. 

I'd call that winning Thanksgiving.

nerves

My neck has been hurting for a year. Sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse. It’s mostly uncomfortable to sit, slightly less uncomfortable to stand or lie down. 

I blamed it on the bed and the pillow, but I changed both of those (the pillow multiple times). I blamed it on climbing, but I got belay glasses so that I don’t have to look up when my climbing partner is up on the wall. I blamed it on the drive, but I thought this bigger car would be better for my body than the little one was, not worse.

I went on vacation and nothing changed. I went to the chiropractor and nothing changed. I got massages every month and nothing changed.

Last week I was climbing with a group of women, and one of them, who practices Chinese medicine, mentioned that she does both Chinese medicine and physical therapy for her back.

A lightbulb went off. 

There are professionals covered by insurance whose job it is to make pain like this go away. 

I had my first PT appointment this morning. I dutifully wrote down all the things about my wrist surgeries and my ulnar nerve problems and my shoulder catching. 

The PT moved my arm and had me move my head and measured all sorts of things. At one point, she had me sit straight, hands on my lap, and she ran her fingers down my arms.

“Can you feel one more than the other?” she asked.

“I think your right hand is actually colder than the left,” I said. 

She switched her hands. 

Nope. I just can’t feel what’s happening to my right arm as much as I can what’s happening to my left.

So that’s weird. 

It turns out that those same nerves - the median and ulnar nerves - that have long bugged me in my hand have now decided to bug me in my neck. I’ve cricked them up somehow. Nerve problems seem to be my thing.

Now I have a bunch of exercises and things to do. And my $100 pillow just arrived (ordered before the appointment). I’m hoping there is hope on the horizon.

But also, I’m still going climbing tonight. 

stories

When I first started commuting to State City every day, people kept saying, "Oh, are you going to listen to audiobooks?" And of course I was not going to listen to audiobooks, because I am a visual person, people, a visual person, and I read books, not listen to them. 

I listened to music, and then when I found that gave me too much time to think about how other people on the road were driving, I switched to NPR, and then there was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad election, and I couldn't listen to NPR anymore because the news made me furious (so many awful things being done to so many people), and I went back to music.

One day, on a drive back from Central Ski Town that devolved into a blizzard up on the mountain, J. put on an audiobook. I was driving, wearing my glasses, and the starbursts I saw through the glasses whenever a car passed driving the other way nearly blinded me through the driving snow. 

But in the background was this story playing through the speakers. I got caught up in the story as I drove, and it let my kinesthetic brain focus on the road while my auditory brain listened to the words.*

The book was so good.

I promptly listened to all the books J. owned on aud!ble, and when I ran out of those, I had him buy some more, and when I ran out of those, I downloaded the library app and started borrowing audiobooks from them. I tried podcasts somewhere in between, but they didn't draw me into a story in the same way.

Turns out stories are exactly what I needed to take my mind off the hour of commuting in the morning and evening. Don't get me wrong, I still have a little bit of brain left over to notice how inefficient it is when everyone drives in the two left lanes and the right lane sits empty, but I don't have the brain space to get so frustrated by it. My stress level has decreased dramatically. I almost don't mind the commute.

I guess it helps that I finally got a car with bluet00th that will start right up with the audiobook when I get in the car. Without bluet00th, this would be impossible. I'd be in my old ways of propping the phone up on the speedometer and trying to turn it up loud enough to be heard over the road noise when I needed to listen to something on my phone. Or headphones, I guess. That's awkward while driving.

(Side note: now that I have a car with a push button start, I am flummoxed by other people's cars. What is this key of which you speak? I reach automatically to push the button and turn the car off, and there is no button. How does this even work? 20 years of muscle memory, gone in just a few months.)

* I took an adult learning class once, and they taught us that if you are, like me, primarily a visual learner, second a kinesthetic learner, and least an auditory learner, you probably need to do something kinesthetic while listening, in order to process the information. 

days

J. and I hosted Thanksgiving at his house. Truthfully, J. did most of the work. And bought most of the food. I ordered the turkey, but J. picked it up and made the sage butter rub and basted the turkey every hour.  

But I made two pies and a sweet potato dish (you're going to want to make this asap: Crispy Sweet Potato Roast. The chili lemon vinaigrette is perfect), and I helped with the general prep. 

And the cleanup. The cleanup has taken days. I guess it didn't help that we decided to make stock out of the turkey carcass. And then we had to figure out how to transfer all the broth to another pan even though we'd left too much of the turkey meat on the bones. We still have to get all the broth into containers. And I'm fairly sure the butter is still sitting on the counter. 

Yesterday we went downtown to watch the tree lighting. A year ago yesterday (or today, or tomorrow, depending on how you count; we decided to count by the day after Thanksgiving), J. and I went on our first date to the tree lighting. We stood in the crowd again. Then we went to wait in line for the same restaurant we waited in line for last year. 

Only this year, we went rock climbing first, and J. isn't a stranger. 

The woman standing behind us in line said uncomplimentary things about the peanut curry, which is what I was planning to order. I ordered it anyway, and it was delicious. "I knew you were going to order it as soon as the guy mentioned green beans," J. said. (The green beans were perfect.)

Today we went for a hike in old growth forest in the rain, deterred at one point because there were many signs forbidding entrance onto private property. I neglected to keep my hood up. Rain dripped down my back, and we turned around when we started hearing closer gunshots; we'd forgotten to wear orange during hunting season. 

On the drive out, when we hit pavement, we heard a strange noise. "I'll check," I said, and jumped out to look. "Drive forward a little."

There was a bolt stuck in the tire, so we pulled off in an opportune place (namely, the middle of a dying timber town) to change it. J. jacked up the car. I wrestled the muddy tire into the trunk. 

We limped back to the suburbs on the donut, with the tire pressure light on all the way. I read the manual. Blah blah blah, driving on the donut may make the tire pressure light come on. It's fine, right?

We left the car at the shop, and I shivered as we walked to a nearby restaurant (the same one where we attended a wedding a few weeks ago). J. kept one of my hands warm, at least. He can't believe how fast I lose body heat. I can't understand how he manages to retain his. It took changing into the dry clothes that I had in my bag in order to warm me up.

When we got back, J.'s car was up on the lift, and two tires were off. 

Turns out the car had picked up two bolts. 

But we made it back in time for J. to catch most of the game. Some sort of sportsing, I don't know. There may be a ball involved. 

indoor

I've taken up indoor rock climbing. J. and I took it up together, actually, but then he flew off to Spain, leaving me to find other climbing partners, and I have done so. I am shameless about hitting people up to go climbing. I will climb with anyone who won't let the rope go too slack.

I might have overdone it a little two weeks ago, climbing five out of seven days. Last week I kept it to three, thanks to busy evenings and my elbow hating me when I climb too much, but this week I'll probably be back up to four or five. I love it. I love it like I love martial arts (or would, if I could find a good dojo in this city). 

(If you don't know the numbering, anything in the 5 range means that you probably need a rope. (More details in the "Free Climbing" section here.) The gym routes start at 5.6 and go through 5.13. I started with 5.6s and 5.7s, which are like ladders, and 5.8s were my hard climbs. After six weeks, I climb mostly 5.9s and some 5.10As. My project climbs are 5.10Bs and 5.10Cs.)

My evening emails to J. for the last two weeks or so, as I've been moving up, have read like this: "So then I climbed that purple 5.10A - you know, the one in the room straight ahead right as you enter, over from the orange route that has the overhang? - and it was hard and I had to rest on the rope a couple of times when my hands got tired, but I did it!!" I'm sure he is enthralled. He's threatening to find me a support group.

Yesterday I climbed tried to climb a couple of routes that were way above my abilities, and somehow the whole afternoon passed while I fought the wall. I only figured out how much time had passed because I was so hungry that I got dizzy. It's hard to climb when you are dizzy.

Today I struggled on a route that I did successfully last week (they put in a big handhold for another route in exactly the wrong place to stop me from balancing where there are no handholds), and then when that didn't work, I climbed a 5.11A. Okay, with a little help from the rope, and I used the crack in the wall (I'm never sure whether you are allowed to use the crack or not). And it was my favorite kind of climb, with big bulby handholds far apart (tall people unite). I hate little handholds. They make my fingers cramp up.

"How far do you fall when you fall?" my mom asked. Since I am a 'fraidy cat about falling, I hardly fall any distance at all. Yesterday I was climbing with someone new, who didn't pull the rope tight when I said, "take," and so I just let go of the wall to rest my hands and fell about two feet. Which is fine, except that I was struggling with that route, and losing those two feet of climbing when you are dizzy and hungry and just want to go home is rough. The good news is that I've gotten way more comfortable with falling over the last week or two. Before that, I just clung to the wall like a burr rather than risk falling when I probably could have made the next move.

Climbing is so much fun.

keys

I bought a new car a couple of weeks ago. An actual new car. It had 31 miles on the odometer when I drove it off the lot. 

I didn't actually set out to buy a new car. I believe in buying used cars, and I've been driving an almost 20 year old car. But I priced a bunch of used cars and started to realize that I would be saving about $2k and losing quite a few miles if I bought a several year old car, and an actually old car is not something I dare to buy without the presence of my dad or someone else who knows a lot about cars. Also I drive about 25K miles a year right now, so an actually old car wouldn't last all that long. 

And truly, I'd started to feel unsafe in such a small car on such a fast highway. My airbags didn't even work on that old car. 

I sent my dad some options (new Camry, used Altima), and he didn't get excited about anything until I mentioned the small crossover SUV. He doesn't like the low cars for safety, and the gas mileage is about the same on the small SUV as the bigger sedans.

After quite a few bad experiences (it turns out that car dealerships are a nightmare to work with), I found the only manual transmission version of the car I wanted. It was a 4.5 hour drive away. And they wanted it off the lot by the end of August.

We managed it, somehow. J. was the hero of the hour, considering that he was still jet lagged coming back from Spain and we both had to work the morning we made the drive.

We got back to Gone West at midnight.

Other than the car payment (I hates them), I am delighted with my new car. It's bigger, it has a manual transmission (my primary criterion for a car), and it averages almost 32 miles per gallon. 

A few things take getting used to, though: it has blind spots, it doesn't accelerate quite as fast as the tiny car (also I'm trying to be nicer to the clutch and transmission), and it doesn't have a key.

I was in the habit, with my old car, of using the key to lock the doors when I got out. That way, you never risk locking the keys in the car like you would if you did the lock-and-hold-the-handle-up trick on older cars. 

Now I can't remember to lock my car. There is no key! (Okay, there is a key. It's buried inside the clicker, and it's really only intended to be used if the battery goes out on the clicker.) I'm often at the door of my office before I remember that I didn't lock the car. Fortunately, the clicker works from afar.

Today I went to a new tea place because there was a gluten-free donut popup shop there, and I've been meaning to try these donut holes (which are only offered at popup locations). I got a particularly excellent chai and more donut holes than I could eat (the others are in the freezer; let me just say a word about the chocolate ones: YUM). I sat around people watching and internet surfing and writing in my journal.

When I got up to go, I couldn't find my keys. Not in my pocket, not in my purse...

I realized that I had left them sitting openly in the console in the car. The unlocked car. Which was parallel parked on a public street, still so new that it doesn't have permanent plates on it.*

Good news!! No one stole my car.

Bad news: I'm an idiot who deserves to have my car stolen. All those times I made fun of people who left their cars unlocked with the keys in the console (admittedly overnight) because what do you expect? Of course your car is going to be stolen if you ASK for it to be stolen. Well, I regret my choices now. 

* I have the permanent plates. They arrived in the mail on Thursday. I just haven't found a wrench, daylight, and time to put them on the car. I have no defense if I get pulled over; they are sitting on the floor of the passenger side. My defense will be, "But it was raining."

hypothetically

Text conversation with J. this morning: 

Me: Hypothetical question: you are driving in the middle of three lanes on the highway just south of the city, on that curve before the rest area. The left and middle lanes are full of cars. The right lane is empty. There is a cop behind you, and he lights you up. Do you: a. Come to a halt in the middle lane, b. Cut across the crowded left lane to pull over on the curve without much of a shoulder, so you are still partly in the lane of travel, c. Pull across the empty right lane to the wide shoulder, or d. Both a. and b.?

J: definitely d

because that just shows how cops pulling people over is dangerous

Me: Ding ding ding!!!

That's exactly what the guy did this morning.

J: sigh. awesome. 

...

I was in the left lane. All of the following happened: we all slammed to a halt. We all had to get over to get around the police car, which was still in the lane of travel (because there was a concrete barrier on the other side). And then everyone behind me had to slam to a halt again because the cop waved to the guy that he needed to get over to the right side of the road, which he did by cutting across moving traffic.

I do not understand the instinct that would cause a driver to pull to the left, into traffic/a concrete barrier, instead of to the right, into an empty lane/the wide shoulder, when being pulled over by a police officer.

impossible

It turns out to be ridiculously, impossibly hard to buy a car. I know what car I want. I know how much I'm wiling to pay for it. And you know what I get, after extensive research, when I tell a car dealership that? 

Last night, one of them told me that I am wrong. 

Let that sink in for a moment: this guy claims to want my business. He tells me that he can get the car I want. He called me, so he apparently does want my business. And when I told him, based on my research, that one aspect of his pricing (a delivery charge) was more than I wanted to spend, he didn't say, "Let me see what I can do," he said, "No, you are wrong." 

Then he proceeded to mansplain to me 1. why buying a used car is a bad idea (he also sells used cars), 2. why Mazdas are just as good as Hondas and Toyotas (which is nonsense and unnecessary, since I told him I wanted to buy a Mazda for the manual transmission EVEN THOUGH they aren't as reliable as Hondas and Toyotas), 3. why he doesn't pressure people into anything because he wants people to send other people to buy from him (while continually telling me that I had no choice but to pay his delivery fee or end up with a lemon). 

I really don't understand how car dealerships do any business. So far, I have had the following experiences:

1. A car dealership that won't come down to reasonable prices. Should a used car really cost the same as a new one?
2. A car dealership that added all sorts of hidden costs and turned out not to have the title anyway. They also wanted me to sign a paper with my offer on it. I get the psychology that they think it makes me more committed, but it just made me irritated that they thought I was that easily manipulated.
3. A car dealership that claims to be able to get the car I want, but insists on telling me that I am wrong about everything. This bullying does not make for a happy customer. 
4. A car dealership that does not, despite confirming in writing, actually have the car I asked to see. They tried to sell me on some other cars until I flatly told them not to contact me again unless they had a manual transmission in stock. 

How is it that every other business at least attempts to offer what people want at a price people will pay except this one? 

If I were a man, I would have my car by now. 

good

I walked down to the waterfront tonight. I haven't done that in a while. Last year, when I was unemployed, I walked down there often, because I had to get out of the house somehow, and I didn't have money to spend. I watched a lot of sunsets over downtown.

As I walked along the esplanade tonight, there was a cloud of smoke in front of me. It didn't smell like anything by the time I got up there, though, so I didn't think much of it. I assumed someone had done something involving smoke and then walked away.

Soon thereafter, I stopped at a railing at a good turnaround point. There was a firefighter peering over the railing (just in a t-shirt, not in gear), and I realized that he was looking for the source of the smoke. 

I started walking back, partly following the guy out of curiosity. The smoke was more clearly a column now. Looking over the edge when I got there, I saw something smoldering in the brush. The firefighter was climbing down around the end of the railing. 

Another firefighter passed me as I turned to go. "Garbage," he said. "Smells bad, doesn't it?"

I smiled at him, but what I was really thinking is how familiar it smelled. We burned our garbage in Liberia and in Rwanda. I know that smell, and it feels like home.

(Side story that I may have told before: I was at a music festival during my college years. It was very hot, and things sometimes got thrown on the ground and trampled. At one point I sniffed the air and said, "Ah. Smells like rotting garbage in the hot sun. I remember that smell from Liberia. It smells like home." One of the people I was with said, "Don't you think it's a little messed up if a smell like that makes you feel at home?" But I do not, in fact, think that is messed up. I never have.)

Walking back along the water, I thought of a conversation I had with my mom last summer, while I was unemployed, about how things could change at any time but it's really hard to enjoy all the free time of unemployment when you don't know when it will change. 

But change it did, and it's all so different now. I have a job that I love, I just agreed to buy a car that won't make me feel like a bug about to get squashed on the highway, and a cute boy brings me turron from Spain. If I could tell the me of a year ago how it turned out, she never would have believed it could be this good. 

motorized things

The other morning, I could not get the AC to turn on in my car. It was quite annoying, because I need the AC to work in order for my windshield to stay free of fog when it rains.

I had my oil changed over the weekend, and when they finished up, one of my headlights wasn't working. They had joggled it loose somehow (they fixed it). So I suspected them of also doing something to the AC. What, I didn't know, but something.

I tried many times, turning it off and on, and then I gave up. Ugh. A car problem. 

On the drive home, I noticed that the fan wasn't on. Turns out that the AC only works when you have the fan on.

So there's that.

...

The motorcycle repair garage across the street was extra loud one night this week.

I was getting up at 5:30 am last week, working 10 hour days, so I needed my sleep. I was not particularly pleased when they started revving one of the loudest of the engines over and over and over for a good half an hour, starting around 10:30 pm. 

The thing about a noise like that is the unpredictability. I can sleep through a constant noise. I can sleep through a noise that occurs at regular intervals. I can't sleep through a noise that stops and starts unexpectedly.

I was too tired to do anything about it, but the next day I went over into the garage full of metal and rubber and said, "So, I live across the street, with the window facing this way, and..."

I didn't even get to complete my sentence before one of the guys was apologizing. He knew exactly what the problem was, and how late it had been. They were getting ready for a big trip this weekend, it seems, and that bike was having trouble. 

...

My headlight has gone out again.

bits, pieces

Apparently my commitment to avoiding ants in my chai just disappeared when I got up after 6 hours of sleep on Friday morning and found an ant in the day's chai. I don't even drink the chai until I get to work, 2 hours after I wake up, but it's a ritual, and I wanted it, especially after staying out late for J.'s birthday. So I fished out the ant and went on my way.

I have now resorted to making chai on the coffee table in the living room, since I found an ant on the bar stool. How is this possible? They are everywhere. 

...

I've become the sort of person who reads about climbs for fun. Hmmm, Class 4 but very exposed. Crumbly 5.0-5.3 approach. That sounds like something that requires a real climb leader, not just a bunch of us who have taken the initial class.

I also have plans for the intermediate class, starting a year from now. I have to get in three more summits, including two that involve rock climbing. I just have to find people to lead them, since I'm a little bit of a skerdy-cat when it comes to the anchors, etc. I like safety as much as I like getting to the top of a mountain.

...

I like fireworks a lot, but my tolerance for them on a Monday night is low, and they are going on in all directions around my house. The kind, you understand, that are illegal in some many states. 

There were some kids setting off a firework in the middle of the road, in the fancy neighborhood up the hill. I watched as one lit it and another tried to set a plastic take-out container upside-down over it. The container tipped, and the kid who lit it had to go back in and set it right. 

Fortunately it was just a smoke bomb, and all it did was color the take-out container green before the it tipped over again.

The only other adult visible, standing on the sidewalk I was on with a smaller kid, looked at me with the look that says, "We are supposed to be the grownups around here. What do we do?"

I just smiled at her. That is not a battle I'm going to attempt. I'm sure there were some parents somewhere, off on a porch. This is not the kind of city where kids roam free. 

It's a good thing I can sleep through a lot, because a lot is going on right now.

ant revenge

The ants have taken over again.

J. was in my kitchen the other night and lost patience with them. He wiped them all off the counter into their deaths in the sponge. I found baby powder, which he sprinkled around the edge of their favorite counter to keep them away.

Tonight I lost patience with them and added a whole bunch more baby powder to other parts of the kitchen.

I have no idea why the baby powder stops them, but it seems to.

I had to make my chai on a stool today, because lately I've been finding ants in my chai. And I'm not that picky about finding ants in my drink, but I draw the line in two places:

1. That time that I came back from Spain and Croatia and I had a chai in the fridge waiting for me and it turned out that an ant had been marinating in the tea for about 12 days. It was bloated.
2. The ants that are in the cup when I pour in boiling water so that they are cooked in the cup. The last one I found was breaking apart into little ant bits. So much in the way of nope.

weekends

The last few weekends have looked like this: 

1. 

J. got back from Spain on Saturday, jet-lagged. We spent Sunday shopping the sale at re!, buying very important things like a sleeping bag (me) and a cargo box for roof of a car (him). Rain came down in sheets, so we took refuge in a Thai restaurant, where we sat in a booth made out of a tuktuk and found out that J.'s final softball game was canceled. We ordered more Thai iced tea to wait out the storm. 

2. 

I took Friday off so that we could head off to the desert. We spent Friday morning packing J.'s Subi with way too much camping gear (a canopy is really vital, obviously) and about two weeks worth of food and water and a dog. For a weekend. I miiiiiiiight not have conveyed quite how far away the desert is, because when we got to Sunny Ski Town, J. thought we were almost there. We were, in fact, almost halfway there. 

We ate West African peanut soup and chilaquiles outside in the sunshine in Sunny Ski Town with the (borrowed) dog constantly begging next to us. 

By the time we got to the desert, it was dark, and the camp was not in the same place it had been last year. We ended up driving through the fog over the flat, cracked dirt. It was eery not being able to see very far in front of us. With the fog, we could have been in a forest, even though there was nothing to run into for miles. 

The camp was full of lights and music. People played music at all hours - one night there was a stage set up in the middle of the desert - and lounged in open sided tents during the day. "This is the Pleasure Pavilion," a woman I know from hiking said as we walked by one afternoon, from pillows in a screen tent. There was a geodesic dome with hammocks strung from the frame. 

J. and I mostly went for hikes and explored, though. We drove south to another mountain range one day, and across the desert to the bluff the next day. J. took the Subaru up past 100 mph on the open desert, and then he took his hands off the wheel. There was nothing to make the car deviate from its course. 

The dog turned out, at age 10, to have a bit of a mind of her own. When she got tired, she just plopped down and laid there. That was fine on the first hike, where we mostly followed a little stream. She could go frolic in the water until she had her energy back. One time she laid down and sat, panting, looking at us, while a lizard snuck up and jumped on her back. We laughed at how she turned her head and scared it off, but didn't startle enough to jump up. As soon as she looked away, the lizard came back and jumped on her back again. This time she grudgingly got up. The lizard scampered off for good.

There was no water on our walk the second day, back between the bluffs out of the desert, and so when she refused to move we just turned around and started back. We saw a snake that startled us, but it didn't have a rattle, so we weren't too worried. (It was probably a Pacific gopher snake.)

The drive back to Gone West was just as long, except interrupted by lunch at a Lebanese place in Sunny Ski Town.

3. 

J. was in San Diego for work, so I drove his car out over the mountains after work to the cabin of one of my climbing friends. A bunch of them were gathered there. I made guacamole and we all laid out our climbing gear in the living room, asking people's opinions. 

"Do I need a puffy?" S. asked. 

"I don't think so," I said. "It's going to be almost 100 degrees this weekend, and even if it is 40 degrees on the mountain, I was okay in the desert with only a fleece and this other light jacket."

After dark, I drove out to the nearest airport to pick J. up. He had changed his flight to join us for the climb, so that we didn't have to drive three hours from Gone West in the dark.  

The next morning, we all packed our packs and met our climb leader at the trailhead. We hiked through a large burn, our leader telling us stories about the time he got caught in that fire and had to hike out the other side, without a trail. We hiked through snow, until we were right at the bottom of the glacier, and there we made camp. 

Around 3:50 am, 30 minutes into trudging up the snow, the only thing I wanted was to turn around and go back to my warm sleeping bag. The only thing in the world. 

But then the sun came up, over the east ridge of the mountain to the north, and the world was all aglow, and my muscles loosened up, and then it was just one step and another, all the way up the snow to the top of the mountain. 

4. 

J. and some friends ran a half marathon up on the mountain. There were ten adults and one 2 year old in two condos. (Our condo got the two year old.) 

The morning of the race, J. and R. went off with one of the other runners in her car. I followed an hour or so later, driving mostly blindly since I didn't have network on my phone. It was like the old days: I had to watch for the sign.

Driving semi-aimlessly, I finally found a spot where the runners were passing. I didn't know how many had passed, so I watched for a while and then worried that I might have missed J. Also I had parked J.'s car in a place with many signs demanding that one pay for the park entry and put the proof of payment in the car window, and I had not, mostly because I had no cash. 

I should have waited, though, because I beat the fastest runners to the finish line, and it was confusing who had run the marathon and who the half, and it took almost an hour before J. and one of the other runners made it to the finish line.

Fortunately, there was a hot tub and ridiculous amounts of nachos and some crazy 80s kids game that involved fitting shapes into the correct spot while a timer ticked, and if you didn't get them all in time to stop it, the whole thing got upset.

5. 

J. went to Spain, so I had a weekend to rest and do nothing. 

Of course I volunteered to spend Saturday assisting with the summer climbing class. Which meant getting up at 4:35 am. 

I have no explanation for myself. 

I didn't do much climbing, but the wind picked up and the guy in charge of the chimney decided to shut it down, so I climbed last, with my pack. There's a little lip at the top that I struggled to get over last time even without a pack and without the wind. I might have panicked a little. The poor guy had to pull hard on the rope to keep it without any slack, and even then I panicked about falling. 

I didn't fall (not that I would have gone anywhere if I did). 

defeated by the children, again

Scenes from a trampoline park:

1. 

J. went running off to try something. The trampoline lifeguard dashed after him. 

"I think he forgot about the no running," I said. 

"First I thought he was running because a kid got hurt," the TL said. "Then I remembered that you two didn't come with any kids."

"You're making quite an assumption there, thinking he's not a kid," I said. 

"I kind of got that," the TL said. 

(J. found this hilarious. I am saying nothing here that I have not already said to him.)

2. 

J. fell into the air pit while trying to walk along a challenge tunnel, one foot on each wall. 

He crawled across the pit and managed to hoist himself out. 

Across the pit, a kid fell into it and stood up, walking effortlessly on the air. 

3. 

I dropped into the air pit just to see how it felt. (Weird.) 

When I clambered laboriously out, there was a girl with dark red-blonde hair staring at me. 

"You're supposed to wear closed-toe shoes to go in there," she said sternly, and pointed at the sign not three feet from me."

"Oh," I said. "You're right. You also have to be four feet tall. Do you do this one? Are you four feet tall?"

She gravely stood with her back to the sign. She was about 1/4 inch over 4 feet tall.

Then she showed me her caramel apple lollipop. 

"Those are my favorite, too," I told her.

4. 

I jumped off a ledge onto a trampoline, but my knees gave out and I fell. I rolled into a ball and stayed there.

I finally moved when I heard the TL coming over, expecting him to yell at me for lying down. 

"Oh, good," the TL said. "You aren't dead."

"She's just embarrassed," J. said.

5. 

J.'s list of injuries grew: 

1. He slammed into the ledge as he bounced back toward it (arm). 
2. He bounced on his head (neck).
3. He got rug burn all over his feet, knees, and elbows. 
4. That pulled muscle he already had in his thigh, from softball and all the other sports. 

"I'm so old," he said on one of the injury-recovery breaks. "Why would you want to date an old broken guy?"

(That's funny because he's younger than me.)

6. 

"You guys lasted a lot longer than most adults," the TL said. "Most people over the age of, like, 18, give up after an hour. It was a mistake, though. You'll regret it tomorrow. It was a mistake."

7. 

"Was that in the 1950s?" I asked J., today, when he told me the name of his first girlfriend. "That would be a good 50s name."

"The way I feel today, it might have been," he said.

...

(We actually both feel better than we expected. Trampolines are hard work.)

expense

One thing I am learning about mountaineering is that, if you let it, it will take all your time and all your money. Three weeks in, it's taken about $800 (and counting), all my Saturdays, two Tuesday nights and one Friday afternoon. Between that and the commute, I do virtually nothing else. 

The good news is that I save money in other areas. Plans for Friday night? What plans? I'm getting ready for a hike and going to bed in time to get up at 4:45 am. 

Yesterday's hike was even harder than the previous two, although I'm getting stronger and learning how to be more efficient. The key has been the rest step, which means that each time I take a step on a steep uphill, I lock my back knee, stretching my calf and improving blood flow. With that step, the 1000 vertical feet per mile for 3.5 miles was no problem. 

Also, I stay near the front. The front moves slowly and steadily. But I've learned that the long line of 20 people inch-worms, as the instructor says, and when you are in the back you have to stop for the people who are slow getting over some obstacle and then try to move faster to catch up. 

I am not so much sore today as I am stiff. My muscles are pleasantly tired, but my joints are displeased with me, especially my knees. I got stuck with the rope, you see, the 8 pound rope strapped onto my backpack, for most of the way down, even though I had proclaimed on the way up that I would carry it all the way up if only I didn't have to carry it down. Still, somehow, after hiking up and over a couple of saddles, it was my turn again by the time we started hiking straight down.

"What are your plans for the year?" the instructor asked, on the way straight up the hill.

"I haven't really thought much beyond this class," I said. "I'd like to hike [Mountain I've Climbed Twice Before] again, because I have friends who haven't done it. And I never thought I wanted to climb [Mountain that Overlooks the City] because too many people die on it, but now I think I might try it if I were with people whose safety conscientiousness I trusted."

"You've made a good start toward [Mountain that Overlooks the City]," he said. "Most people who die on it die because they aren't being as cautious as they should be."

So that might happen, despite my proclamations only 3 weeks ago that it would never would.

We also rappelled for the first time. Not straight down, though. We just practiced the rappelling technique on a very steep section of trail, which I found harder than (at least conceptually) rappelling straight down a vertical cliff, because I had to think not just about where my feet were but also about how to get over the next obstacle between me and the bottom. It mostly worked. 

Part of the expense of mountaineering is the class. Part of the expense is the gear. Part of the expense is getting to the places. Part of the expense is the food. And part of it is the fact that I will do just about anything not to be cold, including buying more warm clothes to ensure that I won't be cold. 

(It doesn't work. You can have the best clothes in the world, and when you keep switching back and forth between steep up and steep down, you are going to be alternating way too hot (take off layers) and then freezing (put layers back on). But I keep trying.)

little bitty mountain

I was a little bit nervous about the first hike with my mountaineering class because I am not in the best shape of my life and I hate carrying heavy things up mountains. I expected to be lagging at the back of the very fit crowd.

But lo! Apparently running the stairs in my office and walking the hills at lunchtime has kept me in better shape than I thought. I will never be able to keep up with the dudes who just race up the hill, but I can keep up with the bulk of the group. I never even felt like I was struggling. After we got down and went to a restaurant, I jogged on my way out to the car to get my rope to practice knots. (It was raining, thus the jogging, but the point is that I had the energy to jog.)

We hiked a little mountain that I've hiked before - it's about 3 miles up, with 2800' of elevation gain. Any time a hike approaches 1000' vertical feet per mile, I consider it strenuous. And I've hiked this mountain before, but it was two years ago when I was out of shape and having some issues figuring out how to pack the right food for hikes. I also hiked with some people who were radically in shape, so I almost don't even remember it. It was a haze of exhaustion and hypoglycemia. 

Not so, this time around. Even when I had to carry the rope on the steepest part of the trail, I was near the front of the pack, looking back to make sure we didn't lose the stragglers. 

The sun came out as we approached the tree line, but the wind threatened to blow us off the mountain. I put on my puffy jacket and my rain coat, and then I rolled up my neck warmer and put it over my ears. 

At the very top, some of the experienced climbers had gone up before us and were waiting with snacks and hot chocolate. 

Every climb should have people waiting at the top with snacks and hot chocolate. 

And it didn't start dumping rain until we got back to the car, which is a complete win for spring in this part of the world.